Winslow Myers Op-Eds

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Hundreds
of people recently paid big bucks to hear Monica Lewinsky give a carefully
crafted but also quite touching TED talk announcing her survival of a public
shaming of planetary proportions.

Brené Brown, a leading researcher who teaches
resilience to shame, asserts that a major root cause of our collective shame
originates in a paradigm of scarcity: the main message of our culture is that
our ordinary lives are not special enough. We are not thin enough, rich enough,
beautiful enough, interesting enough, accomplished enough. Adding to the mix
are pervasive early experiences of humiliation. An art teacher once told my
father there was no hope that he could ever learn to draw. This casual comment
stayed with him all his life. School experiences of this sort are legion.

Notwithstanding
Brown’s essential research, the roots of shame are even more existential than the
superficial criteria of our materialist and appearance-obsessed culture; for
proof we need only look to the primordial mythology of Adam and Eve covering
their privates after eating the forbidden fruit. The meaning of the myth is still
debated; in one interpretation, their shame represented not a disobedient fall
into original sin, but a fall upward
into consciousness and conscience—into the healthy vulnerability indicated by
our capacity for shame.

Having
earned my undergraduate degree, I was troubled for decades by a repetitive
dream in which I needed to go back to my college as an adult and take one more
year of courses in order to authenticate my diploma. It was only in middle age,
as I began to fulfill my professional potential, by which time I had acquired
enough experience to forgive myself for some serious mistakes of work and love,
that the dream ceased to recur. The dream was a manifestation of shame, a deep
sense of not living up to the birthright of what it was possible for me to be.
Shame and its complement, empathy, are built-in software that helps weave people
together in the web of interdependence we call culture—the culture that is and
the culture that might be.

Our
present culture shames selectively. Monica Lewinsky, whose moment of youthful complicity
with a powerful man threatened only herself and one family, albeit a very
public family, must carefully eat crow in order to move on. Richard Bruce Cheney,
the proximate cause not only of the lies that engendered the ongoing deaths of
hundreds of thousands in Iraq and surroundings but also of the environmental
catastrophe of fracking, remains comfortably unashamed of the agony he has brought
to whole peoples and landscapes.Let’s
not hold our breath waiting for him to do a repentant TED talk any time soon.

The
shame of our planetary condition is even deeper than an oligarchic culture where
those insulated by power get to pick who gets a pass and who does not.After millennia of wars, the human
family still accepts the shameless notion that killing each other will resolve
our many conflicts.Not a day goes
by that we don’t hear from denizens of this or that prestigious Washington
think-tank, often not speaking truth to
power but beating the drums of power,
lending a veneer of legitimacy to activities for which we should be thoroughly
ashamed and embarrassed—secret arms sales to all sides in a conflict, hypocrisy
around nuclear weapons, drones decimating wedding parties, military cost
overruns in the billions that take food from the mouths of the poor.

When
pundits encourage violent alternatives as logically inevitable, violence is
rationalized, brought into civilized discourse, made credible and fit for daily
consumption. At a delicate moment in complex diplomatic negotiations, the bullying
and simplistic John Bolton was irresponsibly given a forum in the New York
Times to argue that we have no other option but to bomb Iran, a country where ordinary
people by the thousands went into the streets in sympathy with the U.S. after
9-11.

A
piece of video footage available last year on the net reminds us of the
shameful reality of the horror Bolton would plunge Iran into so casually. Much
too raw for network TV, it showed a wide-eyed six-year-old child lying on rags somewhere
in Syria awaiting medical attention with her intestines exposed in a tangled mound.
The editors of this tape had partially blurred this slick protruding pile of
guts, but it was still not an easy image to erase from one’s mind. It shouldn’t
have been, because it exemplified something truly shameful, the civilian cost
of war.

It
is possible to imagine a world where violence and killing are universally agreed
to be the most shameful, unmanly ways
to resolve conflicts—because in fact they never really resolve anything, as
tragically demonstrated by the chaos of today’s Middle East and the U.S. role
in it. While unhealthy shame can feel as bad to children as getting their guts
blown apart—“forget it, you’ll never be an artist”—we live in a world where healthy
shame is still in very short supply.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Bob Dylan and I happen
to be the same age. I have seen him live in concert only three times, once in 1960
at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, when he was just starting out, then
44 years later, in 2004, at a minor league baseball field in Brockton, MA.,
playing the second half on a bill with Willy Nelson, then, a few years after
that, once more, at a rather rote excessively amplified concert in Essex,
Vermont.

Before a reading in
Manhattan, Wallace Stevens remarked to John Malcolm Brinnin, “on occasions like
this, the voice is the actor.” (Stevens went on to “perform” his poetry that
evening in an almost inaudible monotone.) Robbie Robertson of the Band said
that Bob Dylan’s voice was an actor capable of playing many parts. Dylan, the
improbable heir not only of Whitman and Hart Crane, but of Eliot and Frost as
well, lives up to the billing. His voice has been an actor of Homeric scope.

A
typical put-down of Dylan is that he never could sing (it is undeniable that his voice has lost much of its plangency in old age), but this is an abject failure to
connect with his achievement. Frank Sinatra, a great singer whom Dylan admired,
is nonetheless always Frank Sinatra through all his singing, more or less as
Jack Nicholson is always Jack Nicholson no matter whom he is playing.

Dylan
on the other hand, as Robertson said, has invented a diverse series of
personae, characters whose unique styles match up with whatever he happens to
be singing. Robert Frost evolved a theory and practice of poetry he called “the
sound of sense,” where he played off tones of voice, the way people actually
sound as they speak in ordinary conversation, against the strictures of
traditional verse forms and beats, to create something fresh (“Some have relied on what they knew/Others on being
simply true/What worked for them might work for you”). This is exactly what Dylan
has done through hundreds of songs, from the caustic “What Was It You Wanted?”
to the sensual “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” to the prophetic “You got to Serve
Somebody,” to the poignant “You’re a Big Girl Now” or “Stayed in Mississippi a
Day Too Long.” Individual performances of songs provide further elaboration and
change. There is the Warholian “Visions of Joanna” on “Blonde on Blonde,” and
the “Visions of Joanna” sung and played with tremendous joy (though Dylan has
on his usual deadpan face as he tosses off this utter masterpiece of a
performance) in Portsmouth England in a 2000 concert available on YouTube.

Dylan
has achieved an infinitely more versatile set of performances than
Sinatra.Dylan’s accomplishment is
all the more remarkable because it consists of a unique mix of the poetry of his
own words, the poetry of melody, the poetry of instrumentation, and the poetry
of the voice in individual performance. These cannot be separated. In vocal/instrumental
music the combinations of melodic, rhythmic and spoken cadences breaking across
each other are almost infinitely variable.

That’s the biggest problem with any academic
approach to Dylan: his poetry isn’t the half of it, or maybe even a third of
it. The three halves together—that fateful congruence of poetry, specific
voicing and the way verse and voice play off against their instrumental and
rhythmic context—will always partly elude the scholars,
even the most brilliant, like Christopher Ricks or Sean Wilentz. Dylan is irreducible and
incommensurable. Dylan and the academy
have always been oil and water. I happened to be in the audience when Princeton
University presented him with an honorary doctorate, an occasion that inspired
his song “Day of the Locust.” He couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable
sitting onstage in his black cap and gown in the 90-degree heat, sweating along
with the Secretary General of the U.N. and other more conventional notables.
Decades later, appearing in the film “Masked and Anonymous,” he still looks
uncomfortable—except when playing and singing.

Unlike someone like
Marlon Brando, who made acting more authentic in the same way Dylan renews
stale musical conventions, Dylan has not fallen into the temptation of holding
his chosen medium in contempt. Instead, even though it hasn’t always been jolly
to have to inhabit his own myth, he has expanded and reinvented song as
endlessly and prolifically as Picasso reinvented painting. He takes risks
exploring human depths that other artists wouldn’t even contemplate. A
song like “Disease of Conceit,” (Oh Mercy) with its seemingly lame idea and
lamer rhymes, shouldn’t even get off the ground, but it ends up flying more
than gracefully. And for every near pratfall there are literally hundreds of
songs that are works of genius—“What Good Am I?,” “Most of the Time,” (both on
Oh Mercy), “Sugar Babe.” (Love and Theft)

Further
versatility and depth is provided by the way Dylan is one of the few who has
continued to write songs in the authentic voice of a man in his teens,
twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. It is silly to
assert that Dylan let down
1960’s radicalism by abdicating themes of protest—because he never abdicated. He has
gone on writing trenchant critiques of various kinds, “We Live in a Political
World,” “Workingman’s Blues,” “Its All Good,” and on and on.The adolescent outrage and wry cynicism by which he first became known
makes up only a small section of his Protean range of voices and poetic
stances, including the poetry of the householder, the poetry of the despairing
and alienated loner, of the sly indirect commentator on crime, corruption,
violence and world catastrophe, and the poetry too of love and affirmation of
human and divine goodness.

At one point Dylan was
even nominated for the Nobel, and why not? As a poet Dylan deserves and would himself give
added prestige to the Nobel, except that the prize is not given for the ancient
bardic enhancement of poetry by music.Neither Frost nor Stevens ever did get the Nobel,
but should have. So should Dylan, though it may be the last thing he wants—or
needs.

At Campanelli Stadium
in Brockton, we were able to stand right in front of the stage, about fifty
feet away from Dylan and his band. An announcer broadcast a hyped
commercial-sounding message about how Dylan was thought of as a has-been but
kept bouncing back—as if this mythological character needed the slightest justification.

Dylan played only
keyboard throughout his entire set, standing with bent legs in his black suit
and white cowboy hat. You could see the sweat flying off his face. He ran
through “High Water Rising,” “Poor Boy,” the rollicking “Summer Nights,” “Highway
61 Revisited,” and other classics. After every number the lights went down and
he wandered off into the back of the stage—to tipple? At the end, he faced the crowd, swaying back and forth, an unexpectedly slight medium for so much song over so much time. Slowly he raised his left thumb and smiled slightly. Still standing.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Very stirring and
eloquent words at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Mr. President, commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march.

“What they did here will reverberate through the
ages. Not because the change they won was preordained; not because their
victory was complete; but because they proved that nonviolent change is
possible, that love and hope can conquer hate.”

Not only that
nonviolent change is possible, Mr. President, but that nonviolence is by far
the most effective route to change both at home and abroad. So stop sending
those drones to kill innocent children in faraway desert lands, murders that
create more terrorists than they eliminate!

“What greater expression of faith in the American
experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief
that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical,
that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that
it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest
ideals?”

Yes! So rather
than forcing him into exile for fear of not getting a fair trial, let’s honor the
heroism of Edward Snowden for exposing the lies of high officials and their
trashing of our inalienable right to freedom and autonomy. You promised the
most transparent government in the history of our country, but there is more secrecy
and persecution of whistleblowers than ever.

It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who
believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving
this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable
truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak
out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.”

Indeed it is. And
that is why it is a tragedy that no one has been held accountable under the law
for the web of deceit that led us into the tragic, budget-busting military
campaigns that have only planted the seeds for further violence in the Mideast.
These wars went forward in the face of the largest peaceful citizen protest
marches in the history of the world.

“What a glorious thing, Dr. King might say. And
what a solemn debt we owe. Which leads us to ask, just how might we repay
that debt?”

One way we can repay that debt and we ourselves
can shine in the light of Dr. King’s glory is not to forget Dr. King’s truth-telling
connection of ill-considered, futile wars abroad with eradicable poverty and
racism at home.

“’We are
capable of bearing a great burden,’ James Baldwin once wrote, ‘once we discover
that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.’

There’s nothing America can’t handle if we actually look
squarely at the problem . . . If we want to honor the courage of those who
marched that day, then all of us are called to possess their moral
imagination. All of us will need to feel as they did the fierce urgency
of now. All of us need to recognize as they did that change depends on
our actions, on our attitudes, the things we teach our children. And if
we make such an effort, no matter how hard it may sometimes seem, laws can be
passed, and consciences can be stirred, and consensus can be built.”

Right on. These rousing
words remind us of your past speeches advocating for the abolition of nuclear
weapons. Instead, our government plans to spend untold dollars desperately
needed for meeting real human needs on the renewal of our nuclear arsenal,
arrogantly disregarding our solemn obligation as a signatory of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty to ramp down and finally eliminate these expensive,
useless world-destroying weapons.

“Of course, our democracy is not the task of Congress alone, or
the courts alone, or even the President alone. If every new
voter-suppression law was struck down today, we would still have, here in
America, one of the lowest voting rates among free peoples. . .

What’s our excuse today for not voting? How do we
so casually discard the right for which so many fought? How do we so
fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future?”

Could it have
anything to do with cynicism and disillusion with a political game that is
rigged against authentic democracy from the get-go, the corruption at the heart
of our politics and economics encouraged by our own highest court, corruption
that equates money with speech, rotting our electoral system from within, corruption
that allows ethically challenged bankers not only to walk free but also to be
bailed out by the hard-earned tax dollars of ordinary citizens?

“That’s what it means to love America. That’s what
it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America
is exceptional.”

Sadly, America is
also exceptional in its grinding contradictions, as your speech itself
demonstrates despite its obvious good intentions and unifying rhetoric. America
is indeed exceptional in the incarcerated percentage of its population, in
infant mortality, in the number of people who may be uncertain from where their
next meal is coming.The exceptional promise of our
country will truly be realized when principles applied in one compartment of
our national life become relevant to all compartments.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

In a normal world, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech
to a joint session of the U.S. Congress would have been roundly mocked by the
audience for its hypocritical fear mongering. In a normal world, 70 years
beyond Hiroshima, major powers would have long since acceded to the wishes of
their constituents and established far more extensive arms reduction treaties.
In a normal world, there would be a single, not a double, standard challenging
the undiluted evil of nuclear weapons, no matter who possesses them. That
single standard would underpin not only a regional but also a planet-wide
effort at nuclear disarmament. And in a normal world, a foreign leader would
not have been handed the most prestigious possible venue to undermine delicate,
complex negotiations merely to allow him to score political points in two
countries simultaneously.

To focus upon the existential danger of a nuclear Iran is to
miss the point Albert Einstein, one of the most prophetic Jewish thinkers, made
back in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our
modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” By
making Iran into Israel’s nemesis, Netanyahu particularizes and localizes what
should be universal and planetary: for Israel to be secure, all nations must be
secure. Every nuclear point of tension on the planet today is equally an
existential threat to all of us: Ukraine-Russia, India-Pakistan—and
Israel-Iran.

Netanyahu did not call for general nuclear disarmament
because he is stuck in an old mode of thinking based in his limited identification
with his own nation, a nuclear-armed nation tied in ethical knots by the need
to choose between democracy and privileging a particular ethnicity. In this old
mode, self-interest is defined in terms of what’s good for my own country, in
particular for the Jewish citizens of my country, rather than the planet as a
whole. The scenario of a nuclear-free
zone in the region is dismissed because it doesn’t fit with the Israeli—and
American—right wing’s hyper-macho view of response to perceived threats. The
drift toward nuclear catastrophe continues, even accelerates, in an atmosphere
of mutual paranoia and denial.

In this obsolete mode of thinking, “we” are exceptional and
“they” are the axis of evil. “We” project our own unacknowledged aggressiveness
onto adversaries and dehumanize them, justifying endless mistrust, closed
hearts, and killing that resolves nothing. “We” become more and more like the
very thing we fear and hate, descending into torture, unjust land
appropriation, secret arms sales, assassination, imperial expansion of spheres
of influence—dysfunctional tactics common not only to both Israel and Iran, but
also to the U.S. Fear of non-state
actors having the same power as the nine nuclear states to incinerate millions
in seconds rationalizes extreme behavior against perceived extremists. Would
the United States have descended into torture so quickly and completely without
the specter of an extremist Muslim with a suitcase nuke?

A new mode of thinking would acknowledge that the nuclear
genie cannot be put back in the bottle, that the impossibility of victory in a
nuclear war is a challenge shared by all nations, and that it is imprudent to
let the tail of fear wag the dog of arms sales, both conventional and nuclear. In
the new mode of thinking, the emphasis is taken off bilateral conflict and becomes
a cooperative international effort to inventory, control, and lock down loose
nuclear materials everywhere. This would cost infinitely less than the trillion
dollars the U.S. is planning to spend over the next decade to refurbish its
nuclear arsenal.

Netanyahu is inarguably right to assert that Israel lives in
one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world, but there is much that he
and his fragile coalition could do to begin to make it a safer neighborhood for
themselves—beginning with restraining illegal settlement colonization of
Palestinian land.

An alternative vision of global security is taking shape,
based in initiatives that slowly build trust on the basis of overlapping environmental
crises and other challenges that simply cannot be addressed by militarism. To
grow this embryonic vision toward robust maturity, we need fewer empty suits,
pawns in the dangerous game of arms sales and endless war, and more
servant-leaders, figures like Dag Hammarskjold, Oscar Arias, Vaclav Havel, and
Aung San Suu Kyi, people who exemplify the new mode of thinking for which
Einstein implied the need if our species is to survive beyond the nuclear age. As Netanyahu’s hero Churchill once said, “To
jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.”

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Escalating
tensions in the Ukraine raise the concern that the “firebreak” between
conventional and the tactical nuclear weapons potentially available to all
parties in the conflict could be breached, with unforeseen consequences.

Loren
Thompson spelled out in Forbes Magazine (http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/04/24/four-ways-the-ukraine-crisis-could-escalate-to-use-of-nuclear-weapons/)
how the Ukraine crisis could go nuclear: through faulty intelligence; through
the opposed parties sending mixed signals to each other; through looming defeat
for either side; or through command breakdown on the battlefield.

In
its simplest form, the complex Ukraine situation boils down to conflicting
interpretations and value systems: for Putin, the NATO-izing of the Ukraine was
an affront to the Russian homeland that could not go unacknowledged, especially
given the history of repeated invasion of Russia by foreign forces. From the
West’s perspective, the Ukraine had the right as a sovereign nation to join
NATO and enjoy its protection, though the crisis begs the question of why there
is still a NATO at all given our remove from the cold war—the former cold war.
Is NATO a bulwark against Putin’s revived Russian imperialism, or was NATO’s
overreach right up to Russia’s borders the initial cause of his paranoid
response?

While
sovereignty and democracy are significant political values, one has only to
reverse the scenario in the Ukraine to begin to understand, if not sympathize
with, Putin’s macho posturing. The
most relevant reverse example already happened way back in 1962. It is of
course the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the United States felt its “sphere of
influence” unacceptably penetrated. 53 years later the international community
appears to have learned little from coming within a hair’s breadth of
annihilation.

The
Ukraine crisis is an instructive example of why the blithe delay of the great
powers to meet the their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
could end in a worst-case scenario. Our strategists have not begun to
comprehend how much the presence of world-ending weapons reconfigures the role
of military force in solving planetary conflicts.

It
helps with this reconfiguration to acknowledge the evolutionary biology of male
(female too, but mostly male) interaction in conflict—our fight or flight
reflexes. Governmental officials and press commentators dignify this position
or that by diplomatically phrased rationalizations, but beneath all the
rhetoric we are still in a schoolyard space, beating our chests and roaring
like gorillas.

It
is a vast understatement to say that a new paradigm of masculinity is needed.
In the old one, I am manly because I protect my position, my turf. In the new,
I protect ongoing life on the planet as a whole. In the old, I am credible
because I back up my threats with megatons of destructive (though ultimately
self-destructive) power. In the new, I acknowledge that the rigidity of my
convictions could end up ending the world. Given that the alternate is mass death,
I look for reconciliation.

Is such
a radical change possible in the present climate of masculine violence that so
dominates world media, sports and video games, and hyper-competitive, often
corrupt capitalism? But the looming reality of more Cuban Missile crises,
assuming the world survives them, will pressure men to broaden out to the
planetary level what it now means to be a winner, to be a protector not only of
a family or a nation, but of a planet, home of all we share and value.

It
is not as if there is no precedent for this emerging masculine paradigm. Think
Gandhi and King. Were they wimpy or weak? Hardly. The capacity to expand
identification to include care for the whole earth and all humanity lies within
all of us, waiting for opportunities to take creative form.

One
underpublicized example of the new paradigm emerging in creative tension with
the old is Rotary. Rotary was begun by businessmen. Business by nature is
competitive—and often politically conservative because markets require
political stability—but the values of Rotary transcend the schoolyard aspects
of competition, in favor of fairness, friendship, and high ethical standards
that include asking one question implying planetary identification: will a
given initiative be beneficial to all concerned? Rotary has more than 1.2
million members in over 32,000 clubs among 200 countries and geographical areas.
They took on the extraordinarily large, seemingly impossible task of ending
polio on the planet, and they have come very close to success. Perhaps
organizations like Rotary will become the gymnasiums in which a new masculine
paradigm will wrestle the old one into obsolescence. What might Rotary be able
to do if it dared to take on ending war?

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Ronald Reagan’s assertion back in 1984 that “a nuclear war
cannot be won and should never be fought” seems to have become accepted across
the political spectrum in the U.S. and abroad. The level of destruction that
would result would at best make it impossible for medical systems to respond
adequately and at worst lead to climate change on a global scale. Reagan
continued: “The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to
make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away
with them entirely?"

Thirty years later, the paradox of deterrence—nine nuclear
powers with weapons kept absolutely ready for use so that they will never have
to be used—is far from resolved. Meanwhile 9-11 bent our imaginations toward suicidal
nuclear terrorism. The possession of even our large and varied arsenal of
nuclear weapons would not deter a determined extremist. Fear became so powerful
that it motivated not only the grotesque proliferation of information-gathering
agencies but also assassination and torture. Anything became justified, including trillion dollar stalemated wars,
to preempt the wrong adversary from getting their hands on a nuke.

Are there flashpoints where systems designed for reliable
and eternal deterrence blur into a new landscape of deterrence breakdown? The
example du jour is Pakistan, where a weak government maintains a stable—we
hope—deterrent balance of nuclear forces against India. At the same time
Pakistan percolates with extremists with possible sympathetic connections to
the Pakistani military and intelligence services. This focus upon Pakistan is
conjectural. It may be unfair. A nuclear weapon could just as easily fall out
of state control in regions like the Caucasus or—who knows?—even at some U.S.
base where security was lax. The point is that fear of such scenarios distorts
our thinking as we struggle to respond creatively to the reality that nuclear
deterrence doesn’t deter.

To see the fruits of this fear comprehensively invites
seeing the process across time, including future time. The familiar argument
that nuclear deterrence has kept us safe for many decades starts to break down if
we simply imagine two possible worlds: a world toward which we are heading
hell-bent if we don’t change course, in which self-escalating fear motivates more
and more nations to possess nuclear weapons, or a world where nobody has them. Which
world do we want our children to inherit?

Cold war deterrence was aptly called the balance of terror. The
present division of irresponsible extremists and responsible, self-interested nation
states encourages an Orwellian mental contortion: we conveniently deny that our
own nuclear weapons are themselves a potent form of terror—they are meant to
terrify opponents into caution. We legitimize them as tools for our survival. At
the same time we project this denied terror upon our enemies, expanding them
into perverted giants of evil. The terrorist threat of a suitcase nuke overlaps
with the revived threat of the cold war turning hot as the West plays nuclear
chicken with Putin.

Peace through strength must be redefined—to become peace as
strength. This principle, obvious to the many smaller, non-nuclear powers, is
reluctantly perceived and quickly denied by the powers that be. Of course the
powers that be are not unhappy to have enemies because enemies are politically
convenient to the robust health of the arms manufacturing system, a system that
includes a prohibitively expensive refurbishment of the U.S. nuclear arsenal
that wastes resources needed for the looming challenge of conversion to
sustainable energy.

The antidote to the Ebola-like virus of fear is to begin
from the premise of interrelationship and interdependence—even with enemies.
The cold war ended because Soviets and Americans realized they had in common a
desire to see their grandchildren grow up. However death-obsessed, cruel and
brutal extremists seem to us, we can choose not to dehumanize them. We can keep
our perspective by recalling the brutalities in our own history, including the
fact that we were the first to use nuclear weapons to kill people. We can admit
our own part in the creation of the rat’s nest of murderousness in the Mideast.
We can dig into the root causes of extremist thinking, especially among the
young. We can support vulnerable but worthy initiatives like the introduction
of a compassion initiative in Iraq (https://charterforcompassion.org/node/8387).
We can emphasize how many challenges we can only solve together.

In the early stages of the U.S. presidential campaign,
candidates are unusually accessible—an opportunity for citizens to ask probing
questions that penetrate beneath scripted answers and safe political
bromides.What would a Middle East
policy look like if it were based not in playing multiple sides against each
other but rather in a spirit of compassion and reconciliation? Why can’t we use
some of the pile of money we plan to spend to renew our obsolete weapons on
securing loose nuclear materials around the world? Why is the U.S. among the
top arms sellers instead of the top provider of humanitarian aid? As president,
what will you do to help our nation live up to its disarmament obligations as a
signer of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

On
Christmas Eve 1914, German and British soldiers crept out of their trenches,
played soccer together, exchanged gifts of food, and joined in singing carols.
Alarmed, commanders on both sides warned of the crime of “fraternizing with the
enemy” and the war ground on for an additional four years, not only killing
millions but setting the stage for the next world war two decades later.

From
the safe perspective of a new century, those soldiers who tried to reach out
peacefully to one another seem sane and realistic, while hindsight shows their
generals to have suffered from a kind of mental illness based in rigid over-adherence
to abstractions like flag, country and total victory.

A
hundred years later it seems we would prefer to sentimentalize the story of
Christmas in the trenches rather than using it as a measure of our own mental
health. In the way we think about war, most of us suffer equally from group schizophrenia,
made infinitely more dangerous by the presence of nuclear weapons combined with
antique delusions of victory.

Progressives
like to excoriate the obvious war lovers among us, politicians who are lost
without enemies to blame or pundits who traffic in crude polarizing stereotypes.
But we need to acknowledge the beam in our own eye even as we point out the
mote in theirs. Tragically, those who try too hard to make sense of the
insanity of war can slip into participation in war. Commentators, even liberal
ones, wanting to appear sensible and realistic by displaying their
comprehensive knowledge of all the parties in complex fights such as the one
grinding on right now in Syria and Iraq, drift away from the essential truth
that the civil war there is just as senseless as the trench warfare between the
British and the Germans a hundred years ago. Calmly accepting least bad
options, we choose from a safe distance whom to bomb and to whom to sell
weapons, only fanning the flames of chaos.

Mentally
healthy discourse about any war on the planet requires a context based in
values both spelled out and lived out by pillars of sanity like Jesus, Gandhi,
and Martin Luther King Jr. These leaders
knew that killing solves nothing and that the spirit of vengeance initiates a
cycle that leads only to further killing.

“Realists”
will reply that the idealism of Jesus and friends is all very well but when we
are pushed we must shove back. This fundamental assumption, apparently
impossible to refute and always referring back to the uber-case of Hitler,
becomes more questionable when looking at the insane karma of America’s
response to 9-11-01. Our leaders unleashed a stream of squid-ink that tried to blur
Saddam with al-Qaeda when most of the perpetrators were inconveniently Saudi
and none Iraqi. Much of the ensuing chaos in Iraq and Syria, along with our
horrific descent into the insanity of torture, flowed out of this initial,
still unpunished lie.

The
light of history reveals that wars often exhibit a causation that implicates
all parties—as we know from examining how the Hitler phenomenon was a direct
result of the allied powers failing to exhibit a spirit of magnanimity toward a
defeated Germany when World War 1 ended in 1918. The Marshall plan demonstrated
allied determination not to repeat the same mistake in 1945, and the result was
a stability in Europe that endures to this day.

There
are practical reasons we set aside holidays to honor Jesus and King, because we
know these men taught the only possible way beyond the plague of war—an
understanding that we are one human family. Those long ago soldiers in the
trenches had the courage to awaken from the insanity of “my country right or
wrong” and tried to connect spontaneously with each other on the heart level. If
journalists and interpreters could remain with the values context that asserts
that all killing is insane, that arms sales that exacerbate such killing are universally
shameful, that war is always the failure of all parties to conflict to avoid
slipping into the insanity of enemy stereotyping, perhaps a new mental climate would
be created—a positive form of global warming.